Hornick, coordinator of Erie's West Side Saints neighborhood watch group, said volunteers have found a lot of syringe needles during the group's annual spring cleanups.

She said she called a local agency for advice on how to collect the needles and she was given different answers, "and I didn't like any of them."

Erie Police Chief Donald Dacus listened intently, nodding his head, then offered to get the group a special needle disposal container.

The conversation during the watch group's meeting on Monday night branched off into discussions about the heroin epidemic and the dangers of the synthetic cannabinoid known as K2.

Police suspect a man was high on K2 when he recently broke into an unoccupied house in the watch group's area and bloodied himself while smashing windows and ripping plaster off the walls.

Watch group member Heidi Miles Wertz, who lives near the house, thanked Erie police for responding to the incident so quickly.

"That's what we're here for," Dacus said.

Dacus and two members of his command staff, Deputy Chief Aaron Wassell and Capt. Rick Lorah, spent more than an hour listening to concerns, and offering assistance and some solutions. They gathered around a rectangle of banquet tables inside the First Presbyterian Church of the Covenant, 250 W. Seventh St., for the watch group's meeting.

They were there in part to formally introduce themselves as leaders of the 173-member Erie Bureau of Police, following Dacus' promotion to chief in September. But they were also there to announce an initiative by Dacus to strengthen the relationship between city police and Erie's collection of neighborhood watch groups, which he called the "proactive element in your neighborhoods."

"We're here to try to support you guys," he said.

Building community

Monday's visit was the second of many that Dacus plans to make in the coming months. He said he and his command staff will attend meetings of all of Erie's 18 active neighborhood watch groups, and once the visits are done he will assign an officer to each of the groups, to serve as its dedicated contact.

"This way you have a known face you can establish a relationship with on a consistent basis," he told the dozen people who attended Monday night's meeting. "You should be able to share information, and (the officer) should bring it back or take it to (the bureau's) Neighborhood Action Team or saturation patrols to try and make sure we're on top of these issues you're talking about."

"I think the goal, the mindset, is the same, it's consistent throughout," Dacus continued. "We're all on the same page. We all want the same things. And just going forward I want to make sure the communication is there. We can talk. We can keep it going."

Members of the Erie Bureau of Police have regularly attended neighborhood watch meetings, said John Villa, a veteran neighborhood watch advocate in Erie who serves as director of the Neighborhood Resource Organization, which helps the groups. But he said it's a great idea to get Dacus and his command staff out and meeting with watch groups, so people can get to know them.

Dacus' plan to strengthen a police-neighborhood watch relationship is a "renewed focus," said Wertz, who once directed the Erie Neighborhood Watch Council.

Hornick, coordinator of the West Side Saints, said her group welcomed the visit by Dacus, Wassell and Lorah. She said her watch area, which encompasses the 200 block of West 10th Street, the 200 to 500 blocks of West Ninth Street and the 400 and 500 blocks of West Seventh and West Eighth streets, is fortunate that Gannon University's police and safety force is also at work in the area.

"Our main thing is to build community, to keep an eye out for each other and report crime," she said.

Other topics addressed at Monday's meeting included a house on one block where Hornick reported noise, underage drinking, drug use and litter and food accumulating outside "attracting skunks and raccoons;" and a suspected drug house, where one neighbor said she sees cars coming and going at all hours. The officers jotted down notes while the group shared ideas on addressing those problems, such as sending letters to or calling the landlords.

'In it to win it'

The conversation turned to violent crime, which Dacus said remains the focus of the police, and to a shooting at a house in another westside neighborhood earlier that day. He told the group that police don't see a huge influx of guns coming into Erie from outside areas, but are finding guns that in many cases are stolen locally and used as currency in drug transactions.

Dacus also stressed that police are not seeing random acts of violence in the city.

"Every one of those shots-fired calls you hear about are very specific, so don't feel that you are going to be somehow targeted walking down the street," he said. "These kids know exactly who they're shooting at, who they're trying to hit. They're not very successful oftentimes at hitting who they are shooting at."

The number of shootings and shots-fired calls is "directly representative" of a small percentage of younger people who are more violent, but who don't fully comprehend "the process of what happens," Dacus said. Because police don't have a strong level of cooperation in investigating many of these crimes, those committing the crimes have learned "they can beat the system and they don't have to operate by our laws," he told the group.

"I've always said and will continue to say we can make any neighborhood the safest neighborhood in the city. It's up to you guys as to what standard you want to set," Dacus said. "So whatever you're willing to tolerate, that sets the standard. You want to be a witness, you want to report a crime to us, we're going to arrest people."

The chief said he won't say that the police will solve all of a neighborhood's problems, because they can't. But the officers are there to assist the watch groups, Dacus said, and he and his command staff will lead by example by being out in the neighborhoods.

"We've got to stick together. We're in it for the right reasons," Dacus said. "We're in it to win it. And we definitely want to take care of any issues you have."

Tim Hahn can be reached at 870-1731 or by email. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhahn.

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